Friday, September 30, 2011

Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called « a precariat » — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also « too big to jail. »

The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.

His gripping monologue has made Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak cry and forced the company's new chief executive into a strident defence of Apple's supply chain, but now Mike Daisey has a message for Australian Apple fans: open your eyes.

For the past 15 months or so Daisey been touring the world stunning audiences with his two-hour tale of the appalling conditions and underage labour that goes into making our iPhones, iPods and iPads. The show, the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (review), has been running since Saturday at the Sydney Opera House and is due to conclude on Sunday.

Daisey has been performing monologues for 15 years on topics ranging from 9/11 to Nikola Tesla to Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard. Earlier this month he presented a 24-hour epic, dubbed All the Hours in the Day.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

MIKE DAISEY, one of the great solo storytellers of contemporary theater, has traveled the world performing sharp, polemical and extemporaneous monologues about Amazon.com, national security, James Frey and a host of other subjects. He brings his latest piece, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” to the Public Theater from Oct. 11 through Nov. 13.

Half of the show profiles Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, the brilliant micromanager who acknowledged in 2004 that he was battling pancreatic cancer. The other half describes Mr. Daisey’s trip to Shenzhen, China, where he posed as a wealthy businessman to infiltrate factories where Apple products and other electronics are made. He says he witnessed inhumane conditions and interviewed workers outside of factories who said they were as young as 12.

Mr. Daisey spoke by phone recently with Catherine Rampell about what defines a “tech geek” and how his exposure to Chinese factories has changed his relationship with his beloved iPhone. These are excerpts from that conversation.

Gawker today reported on a sort of political tidbit that I wish had come up before or during last week's debate: Ron Paul's campaign manager and friend died of pneumonia because he didn't have health insurance. In 2008, a 49-year-old man, in apparent, relative good health at the time (though, there was apparently some kind of prior condition), unable to get health insurance died of pneumonia, an easily treatable disease. And when he died, he left behind $400,000 in associate hospital bills. This man was not just Ron Paul's friend, but a former employee and, as far as the Gawker report goes, Paul did nothing to help his friend receive medical attention or health insurance or did anything to help his mother pay his debts. Kent Snyder was left to his own devices and died.

As I was profoundly uncool, it started with Stand and never went further back than Document until I was in my twenties. As I was profoundly uncool, I loved Radio Song and hated most of Automatic For The People, still secretly kinda do. As I was profoundly uncool, my love of them comes from my love of singing them, not my love of listening to them.

This is the story of why, a day after hearing that REM had broken up, I woke up grief stricken. It’s the story of two boys with few friends other than each other. It’s recess time and there’s a red piano in a green music room in the basement of a private school in Washington, D.C. in 1991 and Dave and I are breaking into this room because we’re supposed to be outside but fuck that because touch football sucks and music is awesome, real music, not that playing recorder and xylophone bullshit we do during music class.

Music is Dave pounding on the piano and the two of us singing REM, a medly of songs off of Out Of Time and Green. Turn You Inside Out and You Are The Everything and Pop Song 89 and Me In Honey and, yes, Radio Song. With—oh God help me the things we have to admit if we are to be honest—yes, with me performing the KRS One part. Huh! Baby baby baby that stuff is driving me crazy DJs communicate, to the masses, sex and violence classes, now our children grow up prisoners all their life radio listeneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers!

It’s a terrible song. Let’s get that straight. I know that now. I am not an idiot.

In 2010, I spent an afternoon playing most of the pianos on the floor at Steinway of Chicago. I visited the Butterfield Road facility in Downers Grove; it’s not their most elegant or showy location, but the diversity and selection is great, including many other brands of new and used pianos. The best instrument in the building was a Steinway Model M — not a large instrument at just over five and half feet, but with excellent tone and touch. I believe it was built in the late 1800’s, presumably in Hamburg, Germany, and it made the newer, larger grands in the same room sound like factory rejects. Its most recent rebuilding — perhaps its second, or even third — was done expertly, without harming the machine’s initial character and prestige. If properly maintained for the next several decades, this 120-year-old piano will remain a far better musical instrument, with far better sound quality, than any new piano.That is to say: no better acoustic piano will ever be built, at any time, ever again.

Last week I went and saw an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) of the Viennese Secession that erupted at the turn of the 20th Century. According to a talk given at the exhibition, this came about when Franz Joseph carried out political reform in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s significance to Daisey’s talk is that the feudalistic paradigm was overturned, or, at least, reformed under Joseph, creating the political climate for artisans and artists to flourish.

It made me realise that up until the industrial revolution, everyone (in Europe at least) assumed that the feudal model, that had been followed for centuries, would continue for ever. In today’s world, we assume that the current economic paradigm driven by consumerism and infinite growth will also continue for ever. I expect it won’t continue past this century.

I’ve said before that we still live in a feudalistic society, only now it’s global rather than national. Daisey’s talk confirms that point of view. At the end of the interview he lays the problem at the door of the corporate mindset that dominates politics and economics worldwide.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The censorship of the app is objectionable not only for the blatant power play that Apple made in silencing its critics, there is also a twisted sort of irony in its statement to Perdercini: In declaring the content of the app to be “excessively objectionable or crude,” Apple has, implicitly, endorsed this statement as a description of its own behavior because, of course, the app was about Apple’s business practice. This act of censorship also raises grave concerns over whether markets can be trusted to ensure the free flow of politically important information in a democratic society. The problem with Apple’s “walled garden” approach to the Web is that the walls appear to keep voices of dissent or even self-reflexivity away from the garden.

As Henry David Thoreau once said, "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." Of course, Thoreau didn't have Twitter!

I was speaking at a conference in Boston yesterday when one of the attendees asked me, "How come the media isn't covering the protests on Wall Street?"

I was about to give a pithy answer about how the press doesn't cover marches unless someone sets a car on fire or someone throws a rock through the window of a Starbucks, when I realized that I myself hadn't even written anything about it.

I don't know a whole lot about Occupy Wall Street, although I'm going to check it out when I return to New York. There are times when one wonders how effective marches are – one of the lessons that the other side learned from the Vietnam era is that you can often ignore even really big protests without consequence – but in this case demonstrations could be very important just in terms of educating people about the fact that there is, in fact, a well-defined conflict out there with two sides to it.

There is a huge number of Americans who simply don't realize that they've been victimized by Wall Street – that they've paid inflated commodity prices due to irresponsible speculation and manipulation, seen their home values depressed thanks to corruption in the mortgage markets, subsidized banker bonuses with their tax dollars and/or been forced to pay usurious interest rates for consumer credit, among other things.

I would imagine the end game of any movement against Wall Street corruption is going to involve some very elaborate organization. There are going to have to be consumer and investor boycotts, shareholder revolts, criminal prosecutions, new laws passed, and other moves. But a good first step is making people aware of the battle lines. It sounds like these demonstrations have that potential. Anyway, I'm going to check them out tomorrow. In the meantime, I encourage people to check out their site, and investigate for yourselves.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Monday, September 26, 2011

After nearly a week of muted coverage, it seems that the violent arrest of 80 protestors this weekend has finally forced major news organizations to spill ink for the ongoing occupation of Wall Street. NY1's coverage reveals that Queens councilman Peter Vallone, Jr. is no fan of what's going on in Lower Manhattan. "You certainly cannot take over a New York City street…We have emergency vehicles to get through, people actually have jobs to get to, unlike these protestors, apparently," Vallone said, without a trace of irony.

Photographs and especially videos of the NYPD's actions during the occupation of Wall Street have sparked outrage and media attention regarding the protests, which have now spanned ten days. Accordingly, witnesses, including our own photographer, tell us that the NYPD has been specifically targeting photographers and videographers for arrest. Two protestors who were maintaining the live video feed of the protests were arrested on Saturday, the first claiming that she was detained solely because she was holding a camera. "Those are the first people the police go after," protest organizer Patrick Bruner tells us. "They're always the first to get held up."

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Oscar Wilde was a socialist (though I do not totally agree with his position on socialism) and a dandy, a cultivated human being, a man with good tastes (Wilde's final words are rumored to have been: "This wallpaper is atrocious; either it or I have to go"). And this is what it comes down to: It is in bad taste not to be a socialist. Being a capitalist is so crass. What is socialism? Placing checks on poverty and placing checks on wealth. Why? Because poverty is ugly and opulence is obscene. What do the poor and rich have in common? They can't stop thinking about money. It is the goal of socialism to free us from the bad taste of always thinking about money.

If you heard our interview this past Friday with Mike Daisey in anticipation of his 24-hour monologue All The Hours In The Day, perhaps you're curious to know what happened. Well, the short answer is that it actually did happen: he performed from 6 p.m. on Saturday until 6 p.m. on Sunday. He wove a multi-threaded tale involving Warren Zevon, Walt Disney, and Philip K. Dick, along with the ghosts, frailties, failures and obsessions of his own life. I know this because I was there for 18 of those hours. Other people were there for the duration, forming a sort of performance art refugee camp at Washington High.

Being a night person, and a night person with insomnia. This is the time when one might naturally go to sleep if nothing is done about it. And slowly moving up the going to bed time until you resemble normalcy. Until something happens, which draws you out and you slip.

He talks about film (in the context of the German female whore and in the context of the male self). How film comes out of the creator and never returns. So different than theater where it is from and to the performer every time. Different than art which lives and breathe through the artist.

And corporations. What we cede. What we bargain. How they've changed how we view and value art.

And Peter Falk's backup glass eye.

We are at the midway point. Twelve hours of twenty-four.

This break's snack was marshmallows and hot cocoa. And oranges. I forgot that the last break's snack was bacon. And oranges.

Break a little earlier. May try to get a power nap - though I'm not good at those.

This section: radiation - different types.

Lost data - lost stories - art/books are burning - due to technology.

Philip K Dick enters.

Mike is struggling with coherence. Was distracted by a woman stirring tea or something in a ceramic mug - asked the person doing it to stop until a break.

Which raised an interesting thing - I'd already noticed with this woman. She's sitting down the row from me. She recently came in from some sleep. Hasn't been here all along and she inserted herself into the middle of things. Different energy, different sense of space, on a different train so to speak. And she's sitting down there coughing and sneezing and sniffling. Ooops. Glad I had some Emergen-C earlier. I have another packet with me. Think I'll have that instead of Viso.

It's hard to sleep when people are tossing around beach balls and there's very loud peppy music with disco side lights. Oh, well. I'll sleep after 6 pm.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Thursday, September 22, 2011

"The flat black trajectory of what's come before threatens to crush you.""...cocaine, magic, and blood - a visceral liquid bubbling up in me..."

"We always knew it - in that dark moment between remembering and forgetting."

Arriving in Disney World - the place which has stolen out imaginations because we let it. So much more. Pieces and parts as he reaches into everything that has come before and the real and other real and the not quite real. Or?

It has been a ride.

Several more boxes of doughnuts at the doors, passed up and down the aisles. A simple one - a plain one for me. Just a little burst of sugar to get to the end. No more caffeine. Not that I think it will keep me awake for very long, but my body said 'nuf. I have now been up for 30 hours.

Recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") puts forth that incubating humans act out evolution as they grow from zygote to baby. This was a popular idea a century ago, but it's turned out the science isn't that simple. Yet the principle holds that the dividing fetal cells are engaged in a kind of performance of all of evolution—from simple to complex, from general form to specific form. The developing human loses its tail early, gains a cerebrum later.

Thus newborns are time boiled down, and every ounce gained is another 20 or 30 million years of life; they compress the three billion years since abiogenesis into a nine- or ten-month performance that runs from conception to birth. By the time they arrive they have gone for rides on comets, teased dinosaurs with sticks, come down from the trees, and run across the savannah.

Capitol Hill Seattle says that after more than 18 years, Charles Mudede's old favorite the Rosebud is closing on Sunday (as does the place's Facebook). Charles opines that since the Rosebud changed ownership not long ago and everybody's favorite bartender Robert left, this was inevitable. But still, he says, it is very sad.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

But whether you stayed, or left and returned, the challenge was the same: to hold on to the threads of a multifaceted narrative. This was not the Mike Daisey Monologue as Journalism of past shows, but something new: Mike Daisey Monologue as Marathon Storytelling and the story ranged far and wide. Jean Michelle, Michael Gibbs, Philip K. Dick, David Bowie, Warren Zevon, Jonathan Ames, and Walt Disney. Chernobyl, the Trinity Test Site, Ireland, Tajikistan, Los Angeles, Silverlake, Las Vegas, Barcelona, New Orleans, Epcot Center, Seattle, and Portland (again and again, Portland). Dream voices, audio casette tapes, Tesla coils, fire alarms, and Trinitite. The Wikipedia entry on Philip K. Dick quotes him as saying, “I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.” That was the story Mike Daisey told and that was the story I heard.

Mike Daisey spoke for 24 hours. Compellingly. Philosophically. Metaphorically. He spun out imaginary worlds moving in time and space. He provided lacerating commentary on the theater, middle age, ethics, and the limits, perceived and real, of human imagination (his heartfelt advice for those who are short on imagination: “just stay up”). He revealed his personal demons. Once or twice, he lost it. And somehow, even though it wasn’t really necessary, it was all hanging together. As the minutes clicked by on the red digital clock hanging from the balcony, as the minutes rounded the 30′s and headed into the 40′s, Mike Daisey would tilt back the arc of his story (in the same way Michael Jordan might start an imaginary basketball rolling around and around the rim late in the fourth quarter of a tied-up championship game), he would lift the arc just this high, and then he would turn over his page of notes and leave the stage. Daring you to leave. Betting you’re gonna stay. Asking, hey, performance requires you and me, are you with me?

Friday, September 16, 2011

Thursday, September 15, 2011

So, I wonder, what differentiates “art audiences” and “people who don't fucking care about your stupid fucking art”? The defining difference I keep coming to: Non-TBAers are more willing to engage, to ask questions, to react with blunt, qualitative assessments, to scream from car windows and laugh without hesitation.

The polite TBAgoer responses were, frankly, kind of disheartening: Clearly people weren't taking the time to figure out the work, nor were they willing to risk tarnishing a cultured veneer and— gasp— ask about what was going on. Palpable was the divide between onlookers with advanced knowledge of Gallery Walk, incidental audiences, and artsy folk who weren't willing to do what's necessary to figure it out.

Ultimately, I think Gallery Walk is for the public, but not necessarily the art-minded public. Maybe the street folks weren't always kind, but they were honest, and, in my mind at least, honesty equates respect.

Being polite in the fashion of the TBAer isn't honest or respectful, it's self-serving and dismissive.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Saturday, September 10, 2011

I am writing this from Portland, where I am about to perform a 24-hour monologue at the T:BA Festival. Fall is in full flower, and all around me are tattooed girls, strong coffee, weird art installations, and the delightfully inchoate hum of this city. It's a good place to be making something ridiculous and insane.

Today I'm writing about THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS, which begins performances in New York on the 11th of October at the Public Theater after an engagement at the Sydney Opera House. It's a work we're extremely proud of, and I am overjoyed to finally be bringing it to my home town.

So far this monologue has been seen by over 48,000 people. In an age when we seriously question our power to affect change on any level, we can feel that raising awareness means nothing--what has been changed by telling the truth? We doubt. The world is too large, too vast, and too complex for us to affect, especially in the theater, of all places! What difference could speaking person-to-person make against the scope and scale of the world?

But the truth is that this is the language of despair. Nothing has ever mattered if we are not conscious--it is a revolutionary act to speak, it always has been. Nothing can even have the possibility of change if we sit in the darkness, refusing to light a candle...refusing even to open our eyes. If we never see, then we can never fail.

I will never forget having dinner with Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, after he saw the show. Woz is a large man, with big expressive hands, and is a geek's geek--he literally had six cell phones on his person when I met him, and he spoke with a kid's enthusiasm for technology. But he also talked about how my work had made him weep for the company that Apple had been, for the choices we've all made together, for the world we've all had a hand in forging. I'll never forget him telling me how he now had genuinely begun to see.

I have seen that same metaphor shift in the eyes of people in my audiences. I have heard it from Apple employees who speak to me, quietly, after the shows. It crops up in the news now, stories that never found traction before. It breaks out of the corporate narrative when people ask about Shenzhen at Apple's shareholder meetings. It stirs and writhes because people are thinking, and that is an act of defiance. It is the beating heart of the human spirit.

It is a humbling and clarifying thing to be telling this story at this moment. Steve Jobs has left Apple as CEO, and no one can know what his future holds. Times like this are moments of great importance, when we can assess where we stand, and weigh the legacy we've created for ourselves, in both its wonders and its horrors. The challenge of these times is to stand up and say something true: free of opportunism and small-mindedness, setting aside hype and grandiosity, and to instead actually embrace the truth with all its imperfections, contradictions, and immensity.

We are bringing this work to NYC, but it will mean nothing without you. If you use technology to see the world you are part of this--you must be, or you would not be reading this message. That is the magic the theater is best at--when pretense fails, and we are in the same room, and we will speak about these tools and what they mean in all our lives.

I hope you will join us. Tickets are selling very quickly, and I've included an offer below to help people from the list get in to early performances.

md

New York PremiereTHE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS

Created and Performed by Mike DaiseyDirected by Jean-Michele Gregory

October 11 - November 13, 2011

"THE MASTER STORYTELLER--one of the finest solo performers of his generation." - The New York Times

"FUNNY, LITERATE AND PROVOCATIVE" - Chicago Tribune

"SHARP-WITTED, PASSIONATELY DELIVERED" - Boston Globe

Following the success of The Last Cargo Cult, Mike Daisey turns his razor-sharp wit to America's most mysterious technology icon in this hilarious and harrowing tale of pride, beauty, lust, and industrial design. He illuminates how the CEO of Apple and his obsessions shape our lives, while sharing stories of his own travels to China to investigate the factories where millions toil to make iPhones and iPods. Daisey's dangerous journey shines a light on our love affair with our devices and the human cost of creating them.

"I will never be the same after seeing that show." - Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder

Following sold-out runs in Seattle, Berkeley, and Washington D.C., Mike Daisey returns to The Public!

Friday, September 09, 2011

When I meet Mike Daisey at a restaurant in his Brooklyn neighbourhood, he is understandably preoccupied. He is soon to deliver a 24-hour monologue, solo, at an arts festival in Portland, Oregon, and the ''gigantic story'' is still in development.

''I wanted to create an artwork that was too large to be contained,'' the professional storyteller says. ''At 24 hours, it's so far beyond even the traditional sort of marathon performance that it inherently alters your consciousness.''

Daisey describes the work, All the Hours in the Day, as ''a very large canvas'', which will range across ideas from Puritanism and American national character to the relationship between gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and musician Warren Zevon - ''10 or 11 storylines in all''. The festival program describes his mission, 3½ years in the making, as Scheherazade-like and insane.

Advertisement: Story continues belowAt this point, even Daisey doesn't know if his ambitious plan is achievable, ''which is an interesting tension to have in a performance, to not actually know if you can complete [it]'', he says.

That is because this show, like all his others, will be performed extemporaneously - a breathtaking high-wire act in which Daisey's fluid monologue is supported only by an outline on the desk in front of him. There are no rehearsals, no script, no memorisation and no supporting cast.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

The president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union, Jim Hoffa, recently singled out Apple as an example of American companies abusing outsourcing, reports note. Speaking in a CNN interview, Hoffa asked President Barack Obama to "challenge the patriotism" of US companies in a speech on jobs, also suggesting a tax plan that might get corporations to "start spending some of that money here in America and put Americans back to work."

"Look at Apple, they have $76 billion dollars in their checking account, and they’re not spending it," says Hoffa in one part of the interview, referring to the company's unusually massive cash reserves. "Instead of investing here, everything they do is in China, or in Asia somewhere...There’s something wrong with that."

Apple relies heavily on cheap labor in China and Taiwan to maximize profits. The company's main manufacturing partner, Foxconn, has been accused of underpaying workers even relative to Chinese standards, while still forcing employees to work punishing hours to meet deadlines. It has also been accused of violence and abuse in some instances; guards at the company's Shenzhen campus are known to carry machineguns.

I was thinking of becoming an alcoholic. Because one of the things I’ve always prided myself in, in these first 59 years of my life, is being a controlled drinker. I think now is the time to throw off the training wheels and see if maybe in the last decade and a half of my life, I can be an accomplished, functional alcoholic. And that’s starting tonight.

What are you drinking?

I’m just drinking some cheap red. Some cheap, Argentinian Malbec. Because it’s one thing to be an alcoholic; it’s another thing to be a bankrupt alcoholic. So you have to drink the cheap stuff.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

"I don't get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist's view: 'I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view,'" Thompson said in an interview for the online edition of The Atlantic. "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon."

For the sake of discussion, they assumed that assembly line wages in the U.S. are ten times higher than in China. Given that Chinese production workers earn roughly $1 an hour, that is not an unreasonable assumption. The higher wages would mean that the total assembly cost per phone would rsie to $65 and the total manufacturing cost would approach $238. If Apple continued to sell the iPhone for $500, the company would still earn a very respectable 50% profit margin.

Monday, September 05, 2011

Sunday, September 04, 2011

Apple would love us to believe it’s all “Eureka.” But Apple produces 10 pixel-perfect prototypes for each feature. They compete — and are winnowed down to three, then one, resulting in a highly evolved winner. Because Apple knows the more you compete inside, the less you’ll have to compete outside.

This is what I think when I see Samsung shipping five or six different sized tablets. It’s not that Apple didn’t try a bunch of different form factors — it’s that they tried them internally, figured out which one was best, and only shipped that one.